A hierarchical approach for multicontinuum homogenization in high contrast media

Abstract

A recently developed upscaling technique, the multicontinuum homogenization method, has gained significant attention for its effectiveness in modeling complex multiscale systems. This method defines multiple continua based on distinct physical properties and solves a series of constrained cell problems to capture localized information for each continuum. However, solving all these cell problems on very fine grids at every macroscopic point is computationally expensive, which is a common limitation of most homogenization approaches for non-periodic problems. To address this challenge, we propose a hierarchical multicontinuum homogenization framework. The core idea is to define hierarchical macroscopic points and solve the constrained problems on grids of varying resolutions. We assume that the local solutions can be represented as a combination of a linear interpolation of local solutions from preceding levels and an additional correction term. This combination is substituted into the original constrained problems, and the correction term is resolved using finite element (FE) grids of varying sizes, depending on the level of the macropoint. By normalizing the computational cost of fully resolving the local problem to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, we establish that our approach incurs a cost of $\mathcal{O}(L \eta^{(1-L)d})$, highlighting substantial computational savings across hierarchical layers $L$, coarsening factor $\eta$, and spatial dimension $d$. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in media with slowly varying properties, underscoring its potential for efficient multiscale modeling.